The Abortion Wars, Round 89

Abortion is never far from the headlines. In Victoria the VLRC released its report recommending open slather on baby-killing. And the Rudd government is considering overturning a ban on abortion services as part of its overseas aid programs.

In Victoria the Labor government will respond to the VLRC report, and is expected to allow the full decriminalisation of abortion. In an effort to make MPs aware of just what they are about to do, DLP MP Peter Kavanagh sent to every Victorian MP a stunning photo of an unborn child being operated on.

But some MPs went ballistic over this simple picture. Liberal MP Ken Smith for example went absolutely apoplectic over the photo. “It looks so awful” he said, and he called Kavanagh “a very sick man”. “I can’t believe he could send this stuff around” he wailed.

Talk about shooting the messenger. And this was not even a picture of an aborted baby, but a baby being operated on while still in the mother’s womb. Does Ken Smith get equally bent out of shape about other unborn babies being cut to pieces in a curettage abortion? Does he scream in protest at babies being burned to death in saline solution abortions?

Does he make public his extreme disgust and anger over late-term abortions, where a live baby has its brains sucked out? Why is this MP – and others like him – so upset about a picture of an unborn baby, yet seems to fully support abortion on demand? His distorted and perverted sense of moral outrage has me absolutely flummoxed.

Considering the mooted changes to AUSAID, and allowing overseas abortions to be funded, National Senator Ron Boswell has already taken a strong stand on this, but is meeting with the usual opposition, including the Uniting Church. Sadly, the Uniting Church was once a biblical Christian body, but today is effectively little more than a leftwing, secular humanist advocacy group.

A Uniting Church minister had a letter in today’s Melbourne Age saying we should “end the former Howard government’s ban on Australian foreign aid being used to provide women in Third World countries with access to safe abortion services”. To which one must ask, safe for whom? Certainly not for the baby. But evidently unborn babies mean nothing to Uniting Church reverends nowadays.

And even with so-called safe, legal abortion, plenty of women are suffering and even dying. Abortion is never a safe procedure, and why a church group should endorse the slaughter of the innocents is hard to fathom.

Such are the abortion wars in Australia. But they are similar around the world. In the UK the Parliamentarians are seeking to even further liberalise their own abortion laws. Melanie Phillips has had some excellent opinion pieces recently on the UK’s “slippery slope to dehumanisation”.

Just like Australia, it certainly has been a slippery slope in the UK: “When abortion was first legalised in 1967, that pioneering law was presented as a humane measure designed to end the hazards of backstreet abortion. Few could then have foretold that, four decades later, the abortion rate would be running at 200,000 per year and that thousands of women would have had at least four abortions.”

Indeed, the UK has been much in the news of late concerning some pretty radical social experiments. Consider the recent push for human/animal hybrids. Such hybrids are said to be needed for research purposes and possible cures of diseases. Yet as Phillips reminds us, these have not led to any cures. But they have led to a brave new world where humanity is being obliterated:

“The idea of hybrid embryos – even though they are intended to be destroyed at 14 days – revolts people because by obliterating the difference between animals and humans it destroys the concept of human uniqueness. Indeed, the Government is self-evidently redefining what it is to be human. After considerable humming and hawing, it finally decided that the hybrids in question were ‘at the human end of the spectrum’. What objectionable nonsense is this! Humanity is not on a ‘spectrum’. Either a being is human or it is not. Yet ministers apparently have now decided that a human being is whatever they say it is.”

Increasingly Parliamentarians are becoming the new social engineers, redefining what life and humanity is about, and taking us down a track which our wiser forebears never wished to go.

She concludes, “Ministers desperately want Britain to lead the world in scientific advances. Accordingly, they claim that all those who don’t want to give scientists a green light are religious zealots in thrall to superstitious mumbo-jumbo which they are trying to foist upon everyone else. But do we really want to be the world leaders in abortion, mass fatherlessness and hypocrisy, shedding crocodile tears over human suffering while creating a bleakly degraded and brutalised society?”

In a follow-up column she nicely summarises what has been taking place in the UK: “For years, left-wing zealots hell-bent on transforming British society and taking an axe to its deepest beliefs have ridden roughshod over public concerns, scorning and smearing normal, decent, common-sense views. For years, millions have gazed in silent dismay at a world gone mad. They watched their country being transformed through mass immigration, listened to politicians denying it was happening – and were told they were racist if they objected.”

“They watched the public services disintegrate, listened to politicians boasting that standards were better than ever – and found themselves facing soaring tax bills to pour yet more trillions of pounds into the public sector black hole. They watched the inexorable rise of crime, drug abuse and unhappy children, listened to politicians telling them that families come in all shapes and sizes – and were told they were either demonising single parents or ‘homophobic’ if they objected.”

Quite right. And ditto Australia. We have also been part of a grand social experiment to radically alter the foundations of society, all in the name of progressive visions of some utopia on earth. Yet all we have done is create hell on earth.

And the war on the unborn is the epitome of a society that has lost its way, and jettisoned all moral boundaries. Any society that cannot or will not defend its most vulnerable and innocent members is a society in terminal decay. Thankfully in Australia there are some – like Peter Kavanagh – who are resisting the slide into oblivion. And in the UK there are those like Melanie Phillips who are also seeking to stem the tide.

They need our support, and we need to redouble our efforts to stand up for what is right, including the unborn. Even if we become a persecuted minority, we must continue to speak up for what is just and what is right. Or as another British warrior put it, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.” (Winston Churchill).

12 Comments

I too was amazed by Ken Smith’s reaction to the photo sent by Kavanagh. I wondered if Smith mistakenly thought the photo to be of an abortion rather than an operation. How else could one account for Smith’s absurd reaction?

Does Ken Smith likewise condemn Eisenhower’s circulation of the gruesome photos of the Nazi death camps, or Wilberforce’s graphic explanations of the horrors of slavery? If photos of abortion (not that Kavanagh even circulated one) are horrible, it’s because the reality of abortion is horrible.

It’s electoral suicide for Libs to be more left than Layba on abortion.

Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane

Teresa Binder
6.6.08 /
5pm

The truth of this matter hurts, and he just pricked consciences that are full of guilt.
Teresa Binder

Stephen White
6.6.08 /
8pm

Brave New World and its related ethical standards ceased to be fiction decades ago.
Stephen White

Mark Rabich
7.6.08 /
2am

That letter in The Age, from Reverend Robert Humphreys is a fair candidate for the most ridiculous thing I have ever read. He seems to imply that abortion is open to a wide “perspective” of views for a Christian. I just feel like asking the good Rev at what point after the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary that the innate value of Jesus was present. That would be followed by an entertaining few minutes of obfuscation, evasiveness and/or personal attacks, no doubt. Sure would love his opinion on the photo too.

Can anybody tell me what the Uniting Church actually stands for these days that’s uniquely Christ-like?

Mark Rabich

Mark Rabich
7.6.08 /
10am

Given the let-off for Henson now, perhaps Kavanagh should have labeled the photo he sent as ‘art’. Obviously then the critics shouldn’t have a problem, eh?
Mark Rabich

Indeed, the unborn John the Baptist was called a “brephos” (normal Greek word for “baby”), and Elizabeth called Mary “the mother of my lord” when Jesus was still an early embryo. Yet Mary was a very young woman carrying a child who was not her betrothed’s—a perfect candidate for “the right to choose”.

The abortion debate should not be difficult for those who follow Christ, unlike the Uniting Church that cares more for Karl Marx, Clinton R. Dawkins and Germaine Greer.

Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane

Mark Rabich
8.6.08 /
5pm

Even weirder for Ken Smith, the Herald-Sun reported on this surgery on an unborn child today:

Mark, there is an infallible standing Assembly Committee which is subject to the spirit of the age which regulates just what people do not have to believe in order to be a minister of good standing within the Uniting Church.
Stan Fishley

Michael Mifsud
26.6.08 /
3pm

We increase immigration and give tax breaks while our politicians tell us to have more babies. Then they fight tooth and nail to allow the killing of as many unborn babies as is possible short of total genocide. How ironic.
Michael Mifsud

patricia
30.9.08 /
3pm

If you know any doctors, nurses, pharmacists or psychologists who object to the Abortion Law reform Bill which will further liberalise abortion and force health professionals to be involved in abortions in Victoria, please tell them to go to www.doctorsconscience.org to sign the petition being presented to parliament.
Patricia Madigan